Regulators Warn of New Era of Cyber Risk from AI

24:49It's time now for Talking Tech. And first up, World Liberty Financial is a Trump family crypto venture and is facing an investor revolt. That includes billionaire backer Justin Sun, who says the project is secretly building controls that let insiders freeze token holders' funds and extract cash before a wave of tokens are then unlocked. Look, World Liberty has roundly rejected the criticism the token trades near a record low, according to CoinGecko. Plus, the federal government is moving to settle a case over Amazon's treatment of a group of contract delivery drivers. And the National Labour Relations Board argued Amazon was the driver's joint employer, was therefore liable for their treatment.

25:24But the proposed settlement would provide two weeks' pay to dozens of workers without finding Amazon liable. and many college graduates are working jobs that high schoolers could land with almost 43 % of US graduates aged 22 to 27 underemployed as of December 2025. The worst rate since the pandemic. Why? Many are blaming the rise of AI as well as an imbalance in supply and demand. Ed, this is a question of AI washing. How much is this to do with AI and companies slowing hiring or firing? How much is it actually just that too many people are getting degrees now for the amount of jobs that are out there?

25:57Caroline Hyde:It's very specific data, but it speaks to one clear thing, which is AI is shrinking the market for white collar entry level jobs, data input, basic coding, other graduate level jobs that you would bank on. Now, those people that have degrees can't get them. So they're going into restaurant, retail service industries to find employment. Yeah, even babysitting. Basically, they've got to make the money still work for them. But what is the job of the future? And there's a lot of anxiety in those that are still at university. I was speaking with the NYU Stern professor, Arun Sundararjan, just last week.

26:32And him saying the amount of anxiety among his current tuition folks, but they're also all getting more entrepreneurial. Everyone's spinning up a business then.

26:41Caroline Hyde:Right. And at the same time, college applications going like that. In Congress. We're coming up. We're going to speak with the Roblox CEO, Dave Vizuki. as the company announces new age-based accounts and expanded parental controls. This is Bloomberg Tech.

27:08Caroline Hyde:Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. It's still the war in Iran and the situation in the Middle East that's the big driver in markets. At the index level, technology stocks modestly higher, basically flat were up 0.2 % on the Nasdaq 100. But within that index, the outperformance is in software names. Remember last week, we saw some pressure on software names. That all kind of related to displacement from AI. But the other big factor is also oil. Brent, the global benchmark for oil, you're above$100 a barrel again on Brent. And the situation is a blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. We went through it earlier in the program.

27:41Caroline Hyde:There isn't a lot of news flow outside of that, Caro, that's impacting the index level for tech. But there is other news that's driving single names. There is. And let's check in on Roblox, which is significantly in the green today. The online gaming platform introducing new age-based accounts, expanded parental controls for users under 16. And it's, of course, the latest effort by the company to really enhance safety for its younger audience. The update comes as the company prepares to roll out also a new subscription plan later this month. Got a lot to talk about with the Roblox CEO, Dave Buzuki.

28:10It is wonderful to be joined by you, Dave. And there is a lot to digest here and a lot about age verification, a lot about verifying the developers of the games too, Dave. Just talk us through what changes you make. Hey, thanks for having me on. And, you know, when we've talked in the past, we've shared our commitment to setting what we believe is the global gold standard for healthy, safe, age-appropriate digital engagement. We've been innovating on this for years and years. We started with AgeCheck in January for communication. What we're rolling out today is the next phase in that implementation of that global gold standard.

28:49That, of course, includes all the other things we've done in the past, including innovating on text filtering and non-sharing of images. So today we're announcing kids' accounts and select accounts. We use age estimation to automatically assign people to the right account. And we connect them with appropriate content. For kids' accounts, they get mild content, things like grow a garden. For our older users in select accounts, they get moderate content as well, things like emergency response. And users who are over 16, of course, get regular Roblox accounts. So this, for us, is just a continuous evolution in our commitment to this establishment of a global gold standard for safety and healthy digital engagement.

29:39Let's talk about the underlying technology. And as you iterate, it gets better and better. But age verification is very tough. How good has it been? How many people's age is it getting right? How many people push back or try to dispute? Yeah, we started experimenting with facial age estimation middle of last year, late of last year. We saw that it was more than good enough to estimate age. And in addition to that, we use additional signals. We're constantly incorporating other signals in addition to facial age estimation to put people in these right categories. it's enabled us to do a lot of future things that not really many other social networking or social media apps are doing.

30:24And that includes connecting people with people of the right age, not connecting older people with younger people when they're chatting. And with this new innovation today, of course, doubling down on connecting people with the right content.

30:38Caroline Hyde:Dave, the balance is between codifying, taking action on age verification, which you've done, and then the impact on engagement daily active users. What have you and the team modeled for on how you see daily active users and engagement responding to this new set of rules? Yeah, thank you for highlighting this. And I do want to highlight, as we run this company, we're always leaning in on doing what we believe is the right thing for our huge community, almost 150 million daily active users, and respecting that community and building an innovative product with safety built in by default. We've seen 65 % of our U.S.

31:22daily users now age check. That number continues to grow and we're optimistic about it. So we have modeled this in. We have a lot of other things coming throughout the year as well. And we continue to focus on doing the right thing for our community.

31:40Caroline Hyde:How much does whether a game is addictive or not factor into this, Dave? And as you know, the broader question is whether games, gaming platforms should be talked about in the same conversation as what we're seeing in social media bands around the world and the conversation on social media addiction. I want to speak out for the gaming industry as a whole relative to social networking and social media. There's something really important about multiplayer gaming and experience. It's a connection activity rather than a being alone activity. It's an activity that typically involves creation and imagination rather than raw consumption.

32:27So we see gaming very differently than social media and social networking. And in many respects, gaming is the future extension of what I used to do on a rainy day, which is call my friends on the phone and connect with them that way. So we're optimistic going forward. Gaming is very much in a different category. We build a platform so people can have fun and connect more than what you're mentioning. With a safer environment, not only comes, well, parents and children more willing to use, but probably advertisers even more willing to come on. And that's an area that you've been developing, and particularly a revenue share with ads that are going to be based within developers' games.

33:11How is that being taken on by the developers that you work with? And how are you thinking about the revenue share? What sort of amount are we thinking? Yeah, I want to highlight, once again, we always put building a healthy, safe, and age-appropriate environment first amongst everything. And once again, respecting that community. But as you correctly mentioned, in immersive 3D environments, if I go to a NASCAR race, for example, I may see some interesting products on the cars or on the billboards. And those are typically things that are appropriate for people of all ages. So we continue to build out that advertising opportunity on Roblox.

33:52In addition to those immersive types of ads, more and more of our creators are actually buying ads to help people recognize that they have a new creation. So we're still early in the advertising opportunity, but we believe it's very large. How large could the revenue split be? Have you got an idea of where that percentage will edge out on particular developers? We do have kind of internal models and we're very optimistic that for creators building games and experiences on Roblox, they primarily monetize right now with virtual currency, with our Robux system. There are millions of creators on our platform and a portion of them actually build creations that monetize.

34:39And we shared how this vibrant community is really building a new place for people to work and to build small studios and beyond. Advertising is another complement for how they may monetize.

34:54Caroline Hyde:Dave, I'm looking at your company shares up almost 5 % in the session. I'm trying to work out what the market's really responding to here. And Friday night, Roblox launched this new subscription plan. It goes live April 30th, I think. But it basically replaces the premium tier. There seems to be a lot of good vibes around that. What was the rationale and how do you see it playing out? More and more, we see two types of subscriptions on our platform. A large number of parents, you know, the future of what we see happening on Roblox. When I was younger, I got an allowance to go buy comic books at the local drugstore.

35:33Today, a lot of young people are learning about digital finance by getting a Roblox allowance from their parents. So we do have a subscription for Roblox so parents can give their kids recurring Roblox and they can learn about digital finance. In addition, we announced Roblox Plus, which is for those highly engaged users, that want a discount on the Robux that they're spending, want free digital servers and a few other things like that. It's a compliment to the allowance. But more and more, Roblox is a place where young people are learning about digital finance.

36:11Caroline Hyde:Dave Bazzucchi of Roblox, important pieces, several pieces of news out of the company. Thank you very much. There's some interesting market activity that's going on. Look at shares of Dell and HP Inc. Both of them moved very quickly to session highs after a report from SemiAccurate, a website which basically said that NVIDIA has been in negotiations for over a year to buy a large company, quote, that will reshape the PC landscape without naming the specifics of it. You know, we know in a BFW on the terminal that SemiAccurate has been reporting on this kind of ongoing story since 2024, late 2024.

36:49Caroline Hyde:But the stocks both moved higher. Dell's up 4.5 % as it stands. HP Inc up 2%. Bloomberg News is out to comment for all three of those companies and yet to hear back, Gary. Keep an eye on it. Meanwhile, coming up, that record-breaking Artemis 2 crew back on Earth. NASA and its partners turn their attention now, of course, to landing humans on the moon as soon as 2028. We'll discuss that next. This is Blue Moon Tech.

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39:37Caroline Hyde:After blasting off from Earth, the historic trip around the moon and back, the Artemis crew splashed down safely on Friday evening in the Lockheed Martin-built Orion capsule. The roughly 13-minute plunge back to Earth was expected to be a nail-biter, not just because of the 25 ,000 miles per hour speed Orion re-entered the atmosphere at, but also because of concerns about the heat shield meant to protect the crew from temperatures of up to nearly 5 ,000 degrees Fahrenheit. NASA Administrator Jared Eisenman posting that the discoloration seen in pictures after Orion was recovered was not parts of the heat shield that have come loose or unexpected behavior in the materials as it happened in Artemis 1.

40:22Caroline Hyde:NASA is now doing a full data review of the systems along with its partners, including Lockheed Martin, the company's head of human space exploration and the Orion program manager, Kirk Scheierman, joins us now here on Bloomberg Tech. Let's start with that point. I think that the administrator was compelled to post on X because people looked at integrity of the Orion spacecraft as it was hoisted out of the water and onto the naval vessel. But what does the early data show you about how the heat shield performed? And basically, end-to-end, mission success. Absolutely. The vehicle performed exceptionally well.

41:01We're very, very pleased with how it performed. The heat shield did exactly what it was supposed to do. It protected the crew and the vehicle from those very high temperatures that you mentioned. I actually got to see some pictures that the divers, the Navy divers, took from underwater. water and they looked all exceptionally well you know when you come in and you have that high heating and then the atmosphere the wind and so on you expect to have some discoloration from from that experience but all in all the vehicle performed the heat shield and the tiles on the top of the vehicle performed exceptionally well we're very very pleased we're looking forward to getting more detailed photographs right as we have the vehicle back in san diego and on to houston

41:45Caroline Hyde:Hey, Kirk, that's just good old-fashioned rocket science for a flat-bottom capsule, right? How do you slow it down on the reentry interface, bang it into a wall of air? I mean, on this program, we talked about how the fix Artemis 1 to Artemis 2 was actually the angle of reentry rather than some kind of fundamental change to the materials or design. But with Artemis 3, there will be some tweaks, right? What can you tell us about that? Sure. On Artemis 3, we use the same shape of Avcote tiles, but the formulation of Avcote is slightly different. And so we're looking forward to a different performance, actually better performance.

42:22And we can basically skip out of the atmosphere shortly and extend our downrange, which is really important for our operational constraints. So looking forward to a more operationally friendly heat shield on Artemis 3 and subsequent vehicles. I mean, Kirk, there must be lots you're looking forward to and getting your hands on it back in Houston. And I'm interested in the early data and more broadly the crude feedback. What is the most important things that you've learned from Integrity? Well, of course, everyone you can imagine, we engineers are interested in every little detail that we learned along the way.

42:56I think the beautiful thing about having the crew back and talking about it is kind of what we've learned about our planet and where we sit in the universe. To me, it was so exciting to hear them talk and basically see the moon and ultimately our Earth through their eyes. It was just fantastic. Hopefully you've had a chance to hear that. And if not, you will over the coming days. It's a joy to see so many almost get philosophical in these moments when it comes to planetary exploration and the moon and just how we sit within this universe. and you too, but when you are thinking about how the engineers get nitty-gritty and some of the key things that you're looking to confirm before Orion flies again, what do you think is the most detail-orientated focus you're going to have?

43:43Sure. I think everything that didn't perform exactly as expected on this flight are where we'll really dig in. Lockheed and NASA spend all their time or 90 % of their time looking at the things that didn't go right as opposed to all the things that did. The toilet was one thing we were writing about. Yes, exactly. What other things perhaps didn't perform exactly as you anticipated, even if not badly? Sure. We had a valve that didn't work right relative to the water, the drinkable water, the potable water system. We had a system that introduces helium into the propellant tanks as we deplete propellant.

44:20That didn't work exactly as expected. So we'll definitely dive into those issues. and then a few little features with telemetry that we'll have to fully understand. We think that's probably a software issue, but we'll understand it and correct it for future flights.

44:36Caroline Hyde:Christina Cook, mission specialist turned astro plumber. I don't know how you would describe that. You know, I appreciate the answer of the things that didn't quite go right. And, you know, there's a data process, a review process, right. But what exceeded expectations? You know, everyone makes a lot of the idea that integrity or Orion as a spacecraft is the size of a small bus, a camper van, 330 cubic feet, right? You know, but it got them 250 ,000 miles plus from Earth around the moon and back. And by all accounts, they had a great time. What exceeded your expectations, Kirk? Sure. Orion has 12 ,500 ,000 parts.

45:17So most of those parts did exactly what they were supposed to do. I think the big surprise, or not necessarily surprise, but exceedance of expectation was the systems that keep the crew alive and happy, that scrub carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, that introduce oxygen in the atmosphere. Basically, all those systems that keep the crew alive and healthy and that interface with the crew to the vehicle perform flawlessly. It was just exceptional. And that was all new for this flight. So we were expecting to learn things, but by and large, those exceeded our expectations.

45:52Caroline Hyde:Kirk, this was a great feat for NASA and for America, but we should be kind to your European colleagues, the European Space Agency and the companies involved in the service module. Absolutely critical for life support and other critical systems. How did the service module perform to the best of Lockheed's knowledge? it performed exceptionally well we have a great relationship with airbus which is the industry partner in europe that built the service module and the european space agency they were there in the mission control room sitting right next to us during the entire mission including the splashdown and again they were extremely thrilled by the performance of service module as as were we of course there were one or two things that didn't work exactly as planned and we'll get to the bottom of those.

46:43But by and large, it performed better than we expected it to form. It was exceptional. Wow. I think the rest of the world was highly pleased it went so well as well. Kirk Shaman, thanks for giving us your time. VP of Human Space Exploration and Orion Program Manager for Lockheed Martin there. Now coming up, Apple moves to decentralize its AI leadership as it eyes its next hardware hit. We're on that next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

47:20Caroline Hyde:Apple's hitting a major inflection point in its AI journey. Apple's AI head is officially departing this week, while a new product roadmap is coming into focus. It's all detailed in the latest Power On by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who joins us now. Display-free smart glasses. What do we know? give us a little bit of the history and really

47:47yes really uh smart glasses that is apple's next big thing uh they've grown in popularity right tons of people are wearing them not only in silicon valley but in all parts of the world meta has done a great job with their smart glasses here i'll put them on for you uh these are the meta ray-ban display glasses so these have a little heads-up display in them apples won't Like you said, display-free. The idea is that this is the eyes and ears for AI and the cloud for Siri and Apple intelligence. These will rely heavily on the new Siri coming in iOS 27 later this year. These will probably go on sale next year.

48:26Apple's going to be differentiating here a little bit because they're not going to be working with an outside fashion partner, as far as we know. They're going to bring in their own designs in-house for the most part. They're working on four major designs, I've been told, two rectangles and two circular slash ovals, one in each size. So they're trying to make something for everyone. Similar to when they launched the Apple Watch back in 2015, they had several different colors, bands, and also, of course, two sizes initially for men and women. But now they have multiple sizes as well, a third size with the Apple Watch Ultra.

49:01So definitely taking a look at what looks best for different people. This is going to be pretty exciting, I think. And I think Apple has the ingredients to be a serious winner in the smart glasses arena. Maybe we'll all look a bit more like Tim Cook, as you say, one of the slimmer rectangular designs, sort of based on what he wears, Mark. But the age-old idea is that Apple comes later but wins. How much do they need to win? How much does that need to be integrated with the new leadership in AI quickly? Yeah, well, the smart glasses story for Apple is going to be strong, I think. the big leg up Apple has is this thing.

49:36The Meta glasses don't pair as nicely as Meta would like with the iPhone. Any third-party smart glasses don't pair as nicely with the iPhone as Apple's in-house glasses will. And so given the number of iPhones in use, the attachment rate, I think, will be material for the company. So I think they're very much looking forward to getting these out the door next year. Mark Gurman, as always, with the power on over the weekend, which remains one of the most read stories week in, week out. We appreciate it. Now, that does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech. Ed, we did a lot of AI, a lot of space, a lot to digest.

50:12Caroline Hyde:Yeah, maybe not as many breaking news headlines, technology stories, but a lot of deeper conversation about things that have been going a while now. Check out the podcast to recap all of that. You can find it on the terminal, as well as online on Apple, Spotify, and iHeart. This is Bloomberg Tech. For many men, mental health challenges aren't recognized until they've already taken a toll. Work pressure, financial stress, changing relationships, and traditional expectations around masculinity can quietly wear men down, often without clear warning signs. In Season 3 of The Visibility Gap, Dr. Guy Winch and his guests explore how these pressures show up, how to spot them earlier, and how men can access meaningful support.

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